I can't say I was front and center to everything happening, but I always thought it was strange that Linux used Bitkeeper which is very not open-source. So many battles have been fought around Linux and GPL that this seemed a bit hypocrtical.
Of course things were run afoul when Tridge started reverse engineering the bk protocol/datastructure but frankly the need to switch away from bk was a bit self-inflicted from what I could tell.
> So many battles have been fought around Linux and GPL that this seemed a bit hypocrtical.
Throwing all in one bucket necessarily leads to confusion. Sure, there were and are FOSS zealots and Linux zealots and there is an overlap. Linus Torvalds himself however is a very practically minded guy who clearly expressed that he would use proprietary software if it would suit his needs better. He got a lot of heat for that stance, as some Linux kernel developers happen to be more ideologically pure. No need to warm that battle up.
Of course things were run afoul when Tridge started reverse engineering the bk protocol/datastructure but frankly the need to switch away from bk was a bit self-inflicted from what I could tell.